Why brain hacking is the new black and VR is here to stay
Katie Jackson, Senior Business Director at Brothers and Sisters, discusses the advances in VR that dominated this year’s SXSW Festival
Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake up from that dream? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world?
If you thought the Wachowski brothers had it right back in 1999, this year’s SXSW really would have blown your mind.
With the ever-growing truth that real and virtual are no longer antonymous, virtual and augmented reality dominated the 2017 Interactive agenda in Austin. Sessions like ‘Holograms and the Future of Lifestyle VR & AR’ caused chaos in the corridors of the JW Marriott as attendees sharpened their elbows for a front row seat, whilst at the “Japan Factory” on Trinity there was the opportunity to attend an immersive concert that turned into a live music performance in Tokyo using holograms.
Think about the principles of what we’re talking about here for a second. Virtual reality. I mean it’s basically an oxymoron. How can reality be virtual? Reality is, well, reality right?
Wrong.
The opportunity for VR goes far beyond entertainment, and far beyond big FMCG or automobile clients we might be trying to pedal it to. Its uses extend to industries and categories I hadn’t ever considered would be benefactors of technology like this, because VR can serve a real purpose.
Take for instance a Duke study last year, where eight paraplegics — some of them paralysed for over a decade — regained some movement after 10 months of ‘brain training’ with the Oculus Rift. And this was an accidental finding. Scientists had originally intended to exploit advanced computing and robotics for the sake of their patients regaining a sense of control, but then these patients started to recover some feeling as well.
After a decade of paralysis, these people have been able to make a conscious decision to move, and then elicit a response from nerves and muscles that have lain dormant for 10 years. One of the study subjects has conceived and delivered a child, feeling the contractions as she did so.
Meanwhile, over in Washington at the Human Photonics Laboratory, virtual reality therapy has been proven to be more effective against pain than morphine. Yes, you read that right.
Put simply, pain requires conscious attention. Entering a VR world drains a lot of attentional resources, leaving less attention to process pain signals. Advances in VR mean that we can literally hack our own brains. It’s that simple.
Now I’ve always thought I was a pretty rational human, but after having had a go myself on Chris Milk and Aaron Koblin’s Life of Us in SXSW’s ‘Virtual Cinema’ room, I started to see how real VR’s brain hacking potential really was.
As part of the experience, there’s a moment when you’re turned into a dinosaur and think you’re being chased by a T-Rex. (Bear with me). And I screamed out loud. I felt genuine terror. My heart rate went up. My brain went into flight mode even though my rational head knew my two feet were planted firmly on the floor of an air-conditioned conference room in Texas. Turns out VR can make you feel pretty vulnerable if you let it.
We know from various perception-testing programmes that visual skills training can dramatically improve mental and physical performance. Why bother with Gladwell’s 10,000 hours of practice when you can see a positive effect on performance within 4-6 weeks of dedicated virtual reality training and therapy? Brain-hacking is the new black. And VR is here to stay.
Another of Morpheus’s lines in The Matrix went something like — ‘if real is what you can feel, smell, taste and see, then ‘real’ is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain’.
Well when you put it like that…
To hear additional insights from SXSW — including themes of artificial intelligence, voice as interface and mixed reality all underpinned by the coming 5G revolution — catch one of the sessions with the IPA’s Consultant Head of Media and Emerging Tech Nigel Gwilliam that are taking place around the country over the next month. Further details here: http://www.ipa.co.uk/events/sxsw-interactive-2017-newcastle
